Those annoying things that just go on and on about wanting to talk to a real person and expecting their software to fulfil their needs instead of Satyas personal vision? Cut em loose we don’t need em!

See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.

Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note I believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn’t make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.

I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.’

Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?

Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.

To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.

It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.

The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.

Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.

We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.

For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.

Wow that rant blew up.

And give up on making you explicitly hand over your identity… Sir/Ma’am/Other I believe you have misjudged the ever beneficent Google. This will simply be to augment the other fingerprinting methods they already use regardless of what they might say.

I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don’t think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.

In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.

We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?

Oh and just re-read your comment and sure back in the 70s and 80s when the US was looking to stitch up as much of our resources and industry as they felt like we were likely important to secure, these days… I’d bet you it takes three wranglers to get Trump to mispronounce Anthony Albanese’s name. We are boring and if it wasn’t for the fact that we have so much American ownership and a bunch of US military bases we wouldn’t be important enough to even consider. You know our position on the tariff list is primarily based on our previous dumbarse Prime Minister getting preferential rates in the past then allowing other countries to siphon their products through our ports otherwise we might have been given the same rate as the penguins got.

Well aware. Seeing the US crash out the way it is make me hope that as a tiny consolation we might start to extricate ourselves even a little.

I did tell some friends once that I thought the best idea if the US goes ahead with tariffs on us, is we should start reconsidering the rent on Pine Gap. Would be hilarious if we looked at how much damage the tariffs did to our markets and then passed it on that way… What are they going to do, relocate the number 1 “definitely not a spy base” in this part of the world somewhere else… And where… Indonesia… But guess why that would never happen?

Hey, I take offense at that phrasing, Vassal implies that we occasionally merit a thought on the part of our overlords… I seriously doubt we warrant that much consideration. Reckon we could be termed sycophantic rubes instead?

I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.

Exactly what I meant, knowing how loathe people are to do routine maintenance let’s be honest, most Dysons operate within their marketing specifications for a few months and after that they are on a downwards trajectory.

Miele is one of the brands I respect, mostly because of the way their products are tested. I remember a video from back in the day that showed a testing rig that essentially threw their test subject down a flight of stairs multiple times. Turns out there is a statistical average number of times a vacuum will fall down a flight of stairs and they test that their vacuums still function after exceeding that average.

Having sold them in a previous life, marketing and hype.

We got a lot of people who would “upgrade” from a Miele vacuum because they wanted to stop buying bags, then see them a few months later buying bags for their Mieles.

Sorry to all the people who like them, but bagless vacuums leak sooner or later and say what you will about upright vacuums, you just can’t reach as many spots as a low profile head on a pole.